


Another Start

by alyyks



Series: Family Ties [3]
Category: Awaken the Stars Series - Jer Keene
Genre: Canon Compliant, GFY, Gen, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, art classes, pre-Ashlesha
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-08-23
Updated: 2017-08-23
Packaged: 2018-12-19 00:28:02
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,761
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11886084
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/alyyks/pseuds/alyyks
Summary: Rex goes to college. It honestly sounds easy, when you put it like that.(In which there are sleepless nights and drawing classes)





	Another Start

**Author's Note:**

> Beta by [norcumi](http://archiveofourown.org/users/norcumi/pseuds/norcumi) :D

Rex goes to college.  
  
It honestly sounds easy, put like that. In a sense, it is: he’s not Special Forces anymore, he gets the same right to use the GI bill as anyone else who served, he likes learning.  
  
He choose Princeton U to stay near-ish his family, close enough that he can drive back to the farmhouse to give a hand in the latest mayhem and see his youngest brother more regularly.  
  
Kai’s thirteen. Time flies.  
  
It’s the Art and Archeology department that catches his attention on the multiple pamphlets he acquires once he starts looking. Yes, there’s the half-formed thought of movie nights and watching Indiana Jones with Khodī̂ when they were kids, but there’s also the bombed out ruins he knew nothing about he saw in two stupid wars, and the rare picture of Khodī̂, Ella and Eric with their mother in Cambodia on backdrop of temples hidden in forest, and people who couldn’t remember what was theirs to claim and what had been stolen.  
  
(The thought of Eric hurts. He should be going to university too.)  
  
Rex doesn’t know for sure he’s going back to the DoD after that, it’s a mostly hazy plan. He knows that for now, he wants something for himself.    
  
Freshman year must be a particular level of hell. There’s no other reason for the babies in his class and the worries he can’t understand. It doesn’t help that this month of August marks five month in therapy and he still can’t sleep without the noise of the train rattling his windows at regular intervals.  
  
He’s friendly enough to the kids, exchanges nods with some people that several months ago he’d have seen in uniform. He knows he just goes through the motions, nodding along with the introduction classes he could have slept through: there’s only so much happening once syllabi are distributed.  
  
Not having anything to do in a half-empty room but sit surrounded by kids is a level of hell all of its own for him at the moment.  
  
Then there’s Drawing 101.  
  
Drawing 101 is taught at the crack of dawn (according to the babies, at the perfect time for him) by a professor who barely reaches his chest, speaks with a Russian accent roughed by cigarettes, has no time for nonsense, and never wears anything but black.  
  
By the end of the first day, he already knows that he’s going to take more of Mrs. Ivanova’s classes.  
  
“I am here to teach you the technique,” she says. “This class is not to make beautiful things. You are here to learn, and fail, and get better. Don’t be here to be Picasso. Picasso had technique and then 70 years of doing whatever he wanted from there. Learn how drawing works and then make it work for you.”    
  
She starts by correcting everyone’s posture at the easels—the twenty-odd of them are placed in a circle around the composition of the day, an assemblage of boxes that could be mistaken as a cityscape if he squinted. “Back straight!” she repeats, settling herself like a mountain as demonstration. “You settle!” And she raises her arm, pencil sharp like a knife held as a sword, “Your arm is an extension of your eye. You measure Every. Thing. Like this.” And she demonstrates, over and over, adapting the stance for those who need it tweaked, tutting at kids ready to go back to sleep on their drawings.  
  
Caffeine is a beautiful, beautiful thing, and his thermos is never far from him.  
  
Straight lines and perspective are horrible, horrible things and there are only so many opportunities for puns and terrible jokes with that.  
  
At the end of the three hours, her voice rings out again: “Don’t throw out what you’ve just done. Put the date on it, keep it! At the end of the semester, we take everything out, we see the evolution, you surprise yourself.”  
  
Rex looks at his wobbly boxes that don’t seem to lie on the same table, let alone the same reality and, well. It can only get better from here. It’s a rather comforting thought to have. It’ll just be him, paper, pencils and the wobbly composition of the day.  
  
+  
  
Progress is slow, even with class twice a week—or it feels slow.  
  
Rex finds himself putting packets of coffee, cereal boxes, cans and whatever he can find on his kitchen table on the nights he wakes up with his hand on the gun under his pillow. The kitchen light is harsh and almost wipes out the shapes of the random objects he sketches.  
  
It sounds easy. It’s not, not when his hands shakes from nightmares or from cold that’s not that cold, just his body not getting used to the temperature again. It’s also just him, paper, and the box of cereals he ate out of four hours earlier.  
  
By month two, the class levels up to shading the elements, playing with the shadows and lights and Rex catches himself observing things everywhere, in a way that’s different than the way he learned to look at things in the past several years. The darkest shadow on his watch is indeed at the very edge of the highlight, the light falling on the corner of the walls and the ceiling in his room leaves only lines to map the space, the shadow casts by the trees in front of the many buildings would be a nightmare to draw.  
  
(There’s more going on in his life, and there are other things, other classes, to pay attention to, but this is about Rex and the one thing he choose for himself.  
  
Khodī̂ becomes a Deputy, Kai makes noises about going to med school seriously, Brian’s team lose a couple matches and win some more, Wesley’s team win several matches and then lose one, Ella can’t stop moving as if the grief can’t hit if it can’t find her, Wolf’s still a pirate, Django keeps moving too.  
  
Eric’s still gone.)  
  
His therapist asks him if he’s felt calmer lately, more present. He says yes, and thinks of sitting with his back to his kitchen cabinets, an empty box of ammunition in front of him, the back of a paper for another class on his knee and the ink lines he’d drawn there with a ballpoint pen held like a knife.  
  
His professor notices it, too. She knows the name of everyone, unlike some other teachers, and, well. It might be university, but it’s still New Jersey and there aren’t tons of blond Maori men around. He always comes in early, too, right after his run. He stands out.  
  
That morning, he’s frustrated with his Intro to Art History class—when is he not, he could have learned all they see in class from reading his stupidly-overpriced textbook, which he did by week two, thank you, the teacher is a buffoon who tried to explain Greek mythology by comparing it to Christianity, and it’s so western-centered that it hurts. He tried transferring to another class, but they were all full and locked until the next semester. If that shit approach is the same in the rest of the Art History classes, he’ll want to rethink his vague idea of a major in that domain or set something on fire. He knew there were massive amounts of fuckery: being confronted to it is another thing. Having to write a paper that’ll give him a passing grade but won’t make his own brain ooze out of his ears is no fun.  
  
Mrs. Ivanova comes into the room with her hands full of a crate of things better suited to a garage sale. He has come to learn that those random things are the best suited to her exercises of breaking objects to their simplest shapes.  
  
“You’re early, good,” she says. “Help me grab the other crate from my office.”  
  
The other crate is just as full of things that should be living in an attic. He’s pretty sure he saw some of those things during yard sales in Kutztown.  
  
“Tell me, Tijn,” he really does appreciate that she says his name properly and that she asked him to correct her until she had it right, “what do you think of the class?”  
  
“I like it.”  
  
She puts a glass vase with pink highlight next to a ceramic duck. “And that’s it? Hand me that wood box, will you?”  
  
He does, and he thinks about his words. “It’s a challenge, and it’s different from the other classes. I like… that I’m making something.”  
  
She clambers down from the table, nods. “Good, good.” She turns around the table, looking at the composition of the day from all possible places the students will settle. “I hope I’ll see you take Drawing 102.” It’s pretty much an order, coming from her.  
  
“Yes ma’am.”  
  
She lends him a sanguine pencil that class, to use instead of the graphite pencils they’ve used until then. It handles differently, rougher, almost a fight on the paper. At the end of the class, she tells him to keep it.  
  
The wood shavings from sharpening it with his knife at 3 am smell very different from the ball point pen’s ink he keeps in the “everything” drawer. It’s still a fight to draw with it on the back of a misprinted page, the tip louder than anything else he’s used until then.  
  
By the time he sketched everything down—a tin can, a coffee packet, a mug laid on its side— it looks fairly good, and he’s ready to sleep some more.  
  
She makes him try an ink pen next, the frankly overpriced ones. It doesn’t handle like his kitchen ball point, it’s so much smoother than that. The lines are stark agains the paper, and it reminds him of topographical maps, circles of elevations and notes and information that could be the factor between life and death.  
  
That pen, he gives it back to her. For now.  
  
+  
  
At the end of the semester, it’s just him, and Mrs Ivanova, and his drawings spread on the floor to see them all while the rest of the class draws their last composition waiting their turns.  
  
“Which one would you start over and how?” she asks.  
  
Rex watches the papers and sees wobbly boxes and marks that follow nothing and shadows done wrong. He sees nightmares and shaking hands and sleepless nights and one thing he could do that was his that was creating something.  
  
“The next one,” he answers.  
  
She laughs. “See you in January, Rex.”  



End file.
